Corey Smith: End Your Pain

Corey Smith has been exhibiting his wry mixed-media paintings at Backspace and other Portland galleries for the better part of a decade. He’s also had a full career nationally and internationally. In his latest outing at Backspace, he serves up plenty of his signature irreverence and visual puns: a tombstone carved with the words “THIS PARTY”; a kid pointing a handgun at another kid, preparing to fire; the phrase “PROFIT IS JOY”; and a 12-piece grid made up of the words “SATAN IS WAITIN.’” Still, this body of work doesn’t seem as sharp as Smith’s previous shows. The biting humor seems blunted, the sense of visual invention compromised, the whole endeavor facile by comparison to past exhibitions. As a satirist, Smith may have finally found his toughest competition: his former self. Through June 30.

Ecologically themed art tends to be dull and sanctimonious, but not so in the hands of Wesley Younie. His idylls of environmental paradise lost abound with equal parts whimsy and intelligence. In the ...